


Australia

by ESawyer



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hermione Granger Needs a Hug, POV Ron Weasley, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Ron and Hermione go to Australia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-11 00:09:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18418760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ESawyer/pseuds/ESawyer
Summary: The war ended a year ago, and Hermione is finally ready to go and find her parents in Australia. Ron is prepared to stand by her through anything.





	Australia

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired from a prompt from http://witterprompts.tumblr.com/ !! 
> 
> “If anyone can change the world, it’d be you. Hopefully with me by your side, supporting you as always.”

“See you, Harry,” Ron said, hugging him goodbye as they stood outside Heathrow Airport, a building that Ron found fascinating.

After everything that had happened at the Battle of Hogwarts, Ron found that the way he said goodbye to people had changed. He had never gotten the chance to say goodbye to Fred, and he had not been able to say goodbye to Harry before he went to the Forest, and this still kept him up at night. And he knew that he probably hugged people too tightly and panicked too much when they didn't get to somewhere on time, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he would be unlucky enough to lose someone else who he loved. 

“What am I going to when you’re both in Australia?” Harry asked miserably.

Hermione laughed as she hugged him, “Go to work, maybe? Be an adult?”

“Sounds shit,” Harry sighed, “don’t take forever,”

“We’ll be back before you know it,” Hermione promised him.

Ron watched as Harry as he waved at them before slipping around a corner so that he could Apparate away from the eyes of Muggles. Next to him, Hermione sighed and turned away, wiping her eyes. Ron smiled sadly and put his arm around her, gently kissing her on the temple.

“If you’re not ready-”

“No, I am,” she said firmly, “It’s been a year. If I don’t find them soon, I might never be able to pull them back,”

“Let’s get going then,” Ron said, picking up their bags, “I’m actually quite excited to go on an aero-plane for the first time,”

“Airplane,” Hermione corrected, “maybe don’t speak whilst we’re in the airport, or you’ll break the Statute of Secrecy,”

Ron’s excitement towards airplanes disappeared the moment he saw one in real life. They were _massive_ and he could not understand how something so big could ever take flight without magic. Hermione tried to explain that it was all engineering and science, but that worried him even more because he was quite sure she’d just made up those words and he was starting to think that he should have taken muggle studies whilst he had had the chance.

“I don’t understand why my dad is so amazed by these things,” Ron whispered to Hermione as they climbed the steps up to it, “it looks like a death machine!”

“If you touch the outside of it before you get on, it brings you good luck for the flight,” Hermione told him, gently patting the plane as she got on.

Even though he knew that this probably wasn’t even slightly true, he was too scared to not follow through. He was not nearly as gentle when he touched the plane because the air stewardess made a joke that he had put a dent in it.

“Is that going to stop it from flying?” he asked anxiously.

“He’s a nervous flyer,” Hermione told the quite confused stewardess, “he’ll be fine once it takes off,”

“You know, that might be one of the few things that you’re wrong about,” Ron muttered as they sat down in their far too small seats, “how long are we going to be sat here for? There's no room for my legs,”  

“The actual flight time is around twenty two hours, but we’ll stop in between so it’ll probably be about thirty-ish hours,” Hermione said casually, “but it’s fine. It’ll _fly_ by,”

“Jokes aren’t your strong suit,”

“Shut up,”

The time they spent on the plane was some of the worst hours of Ron's life, and he was including the months on the run and the Battle of Hogwarts in this. He refused to stand up from his seat or even take his seat belt off, despite the fact that his legs were beginning to cramp. Whenever Hermione stood up to stretch her legs or go to the bathroom, he would be taken over with the fear that something awful would happen to her.

When they finally landed in Australia, Ron had never been so eager to get outside in his life, even though he knew that the sun would definitely not be kind to him.

“I’m going to have to find out if there's some sort of sun protection  spell for you,” Hermione said as they walked out of the airport, “I don’t think that sun cream is going to be enough for you. You are far too white for this kind of weather,”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to manage,”

“You’re probably already burning,”

In true Hermione fashion, she had planned their trip so thoroughly, that there was very little chance that anything could go wrong; the three places that they were staying in over the next six weeks had been vetted by not only Hermione, but both the British and Australian Ministry of Magic to make sure that there were no death eaters around. She had also done hours and hours of research to find even a trace of Wendell and Monica Wilkins, but had only managed to find scraps, testament to how adept Hermione was at memory charms. As far as Hermione could work out, Mr and Mrs Wilkins had disappeared off the fact of the earth. Even the Aurors were no help.

And despite all this, Ron was still convinced that Hermione would be able to track them down, because she always managed to achieve everything that she set her mind on. But it proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated and they seemed to be having as much luck as they were when they had been hunting Horcruxes. Every lead that they had turned out to be a dead end: the bar that Wendell Wilkins supposedly worked in was in the process of being demolished when they got there and when Hermione rang the accountancy firm where Monica Wilkins was apparently working as a receptionist, she was told that they had no records of anyone of that name ever working there.

“Maybe we should start looking into dentists...” Hermione said one night whilst they were sat in a bar in the magical part of the town they were in.

“They are dentists, after all,” Ron said.

“I just wonder if it’s too obvious...I mean, how many people at school knew they were dentists? And how many people of those people ended up being death eaters?” she said in the same voice that Ron usually associated with a exam-induced anxiety.

“Hey, hey...” Ron said gently, reaching out to her hold her hand, “we’ll find them. We can’t have come all this way to just not find them,”

“What if something happened to them?” she asked tearfully, “what if we’re too late?”

“Don’t think like that,” he said firmly, “nothing will have happened. If you want, you could go and speak to the Australian Ministry. They said that they were more than happy to help,”

“I know,” Hermione said, “but, I...it’s stupid, but I’m really struggling to trust _our_ Ministry, even with Kingsley running it. How am I meant to trust a Ministry I know nothing about! What if it’s devolving into-”

“If you’re worried that our Ministry is turning into what yours has been like these last couple of years, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” a voice said behind Ron.

He turned around and raised his eyebrow at the woman who stood behind him.

“Um...OK?” he said.

“Ah, sorry, mate, you won’t know who I am - Meredith Looven, I’m-”

“Head of the Muggle Liaison Office!” Hermione exclaimed, jumping up and shaking her hand, “you’ve completely revolutionised the way that Muggleborns and their families make the transition into the Wizarding World! And you’re the reason hate crimes against muggle borns have decreased so much!”

Meredith looked bemused, “I don’t usually introduce myself like that, but yes, I did do that. Now, forgive me for asking, but you’re not friends of that Harry Potter are you? Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger?”

“Yeah,” Ron said as Meredith sat down next to a beaming Hermione, "Yeah. We are,"

“Well, props to the two of you for doing what you did. I followed everything that happened quite closely. You were all incredibly brave for seventeen year olds,” she said, “let me buy you both a drink,”

“Have you noticed that since the war, everyone wants to buy us drinks?” Ron asked Hermione, “I feel like we should just start coming out without money!”

“We are _not_ going to start doing that,”

“Fine, just go and burst my bubble why don’t you?”

Meredith returned with a bottle of wine and three glasses, suddenly turning serious.

“Now,” she said, “I know that you’re looking for your parents, Hermione,”

“Yes,” Hermione said eagerly turning to her, “I modified their memories before we went on the run to protect them,”

Meredith nodded, “And you’re muggleborn, aren’t you? How much do they actually know about the Wizarding World?”

“Not a lot,” Hermione admitted, “I would tell them about Ron and Harry and what we got up to in school - well, not _everything_ we did in school...I never mentioned anything to do with Voldemort or death eaters. Really, the only thing they understood was that I was a prefect and got good marks,”

“Did you purposely not tell them anything to protect them from the world that you were in?”

“Yes,” Hermione said, “I didn’t want to worry them. They were worried enough without knowing that people like me were targeted,”

“I did the exact same thing when I went to school,” Meredith said, “It was only when I started working at the Ministry that I started to let them into my new life,”

“Is there anyway you can help find them?” Hermione asked desperately. 

“What names did you give them?”

“Wendell and Monica Wilkins,”

“Wilkins...Wilkins...” Meredith muttered, “why have I heard that name before? Wilkins...” suddenly, she gasped and Ron jumped, “they own a sweet shop in Sydney! I was just there with my daughter,”

Ron choked on his wine and Hermione suddenly burst into a fit of giggles.

“I don’t understand,” Meredith said, “what’s so funny about a sweet shop?”

“They’re actually dentists!” Hermione giggled, “and they _hate_ sweets,”

“That explains why you couldn’t find them,” Ron said, “no one would have ever thought to look there! Not even you!”

“Thank-you so much, Mrs Looven,” Hermione said.

“Call me Meredith, please,” she said, “I wish you the best of luck in locating your parents, Hermione,”

By the time they got to Sydney, they found the shop closed, which sent Hermione into a spiral of paic. It was a quaint shop that, strangely enough, looked rather like Honeydukes, though Ron did not think that pointing this out to Hermione would help her at all.

“It’ll open again tomorrow,” Ron told her, “so we can just come back - hey, where are you going?”

Hermione had hurried around the side of the shop with her wand out, and Ron had the strangest feeling that she was going to try and break in.

“They live above the shop,” Hermione said, “I just saw my mum in the window,”

“Oh,” Ron said softly, “well, we can’t just break in - never mind,” he said, when Hermione whispered, “ _Alohomora,”_ and the door swung open.

Even though Ron was sure that  the easiest way to either get attacked or arrested was to break into someone's house, he still followed Hermione into the shop and slowly crept upstairs behind her, gripping onto his wand despite the fact that he was quite sure that the worst way to impress his girlfriends parents was to jinx them.

“Who are you?” a voice from the top of the stairs said.

Ron looked up and saw who he presumed to be Hermione’s dad. In front of him, Hermione suddenly began to shake and she almost lost her footing on the stairs.

“I’m - I’m...I’m Hermione Granger,” she said, “and...I need to speak to you and your wife,”

Mr Granger narrowed his eyes at her, “How did you get in?”

“The side door was open,” Hermione replied, her voice shaking, “and we knocked but...you couldn’t hear,”

“Why do you need to speak to us?” Mr Granger asked.

“It’s about your life back in England,” Ron said, “just some...money things,”

“Come on in then,” Mr Granger said, though he still looked suspicious.

“What’s the plan of action then?” Ron whispered in Hermione’s ear as they followed Mr Granger up the stairs.

“Still working on that one,” she whispered back.

\---

Two years later, and after a frightfully awkward conversation with Mr Granger, Ron got down on one knee in front of a rather surprised Hermione.

“When we first met on the Hogwarts express all those years ago, I never thought that this is where we would end up, but I’m glad we did, because I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with you. You’re funny, smart, beautiful and if anyone can change the world, it’s you. Hopefully with me by your side, supporting you as always. So, Hermione Granger, will you marry me?”

“Ron, I-” she laughed and then nodded, “Yes! Yes! Obviously I’ll marry you!”

As he slid the ring onto her finger and she kissed him, he wondered how the Ron and Hermione who had argued at the Yule Ball would react to their twenty year old selves.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank-you for reading! 
> 
> Romione is my OG ship so I can't believe I've never written something for them, but I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> Follow me on Tumblr if you want - https://www.tumblr.com/blog/e-sawyer


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